Including git commit history in a LaTeX document

LaTeX is a document typesetting system, which lends itself well to use within a source-code management program such as git. I found a need to include a changelog in a document, and found this brilliant blog article by Jerel Unruh which creates a HTML log using git log.

For inclusion within a Makefile target, I re-worked this into a shell script, changes.sh, which will also auto-detect URL’s for any Github-hosted repository:

#!/bin/bash
# Find remote URL for hashes (designed for GitHub-hosted projects)
origin=`git config remote.origin.url`
base=`dirname "$origin"`/`basename "$origin" .git`

# Output LaTeX table in chronological order
echo "\\begin{tabular}{l l l}\\textbf{Detail} & \\textbf{Author} & \\textbf{Description}\\\\\\hline"
git log --pretty=format:"\\href{$base/commit/%H}{%h} & %an & %s\\\\\\hline" --reverse
echo "\end{tabular}"

The above script outputs a LaTeX table, including a hyperlink to each commit. In the pre-amble, you need:

\usepackage{hyperref}

In your Makefile, you might add something like:

changelog:
	./changes.sh > changelog.tex

The resulting changelog can then be included in the document via:

\input{changelog.tex}